The present invention relates to computers, and deals more particularly with display of message flow interactions corresponding to service invocations in a computing environment based on a service-oriented distributed computing model.
The term “Service-Oriented Architecture”, or “SOA”, is used to refer to a distributed computing model whose smallest unit of work is a service operation (where the term “service operation” refers to executable code that performs at least a portion of a service). A particular SOA solution (i.e., a deployed SOA implementation) may comprise dozens or even hundreds of these service operations, and many occurrences of each service operation may exist as the operations are distributed, often redundantly, throughout an enterprise. As a result, an SOA solution may be potentially large and complex, and thus difficult to manage. This is further compounded by the complex relationships that may exist among service operations and the underlying information technology (“IT”) infrastructure, such as application servers and the computers and networks upon which they are hosted.
Thus, these potentially numerous service operations may interact with each other and the underlying infrastructure in ways that make key systems management activities such as triage, impact analysis, and causal analysis very difficult if not impossible. Because an SOA solution is often deployed in an ad hoc manner, even basic tasks such as visualizing or navigating the call relationships among services may be impossible when using known techniques. When using known techniques, systems operators do not have a mechanism for isolating SOA problems and understanding their impacts and potential root causes; tracing individual transactions is both tedious and potentially incomplete since it does not reflect IT relationships.